Gavin took his coffee. Mack grabbed his bagel and wandered over to a table in the corner near the window. Betsy tried to look busy, slicing tomatoes, refilling the cream cheese bin, straightening the refrigerator case, sweeping up the relentless downpour of poppy seeds on the floor, but her eyes kept darting to the corner. Melissa, a bird-like blonde from South Carolina, came in to help with the morning rush. She washed her hands in the steel sink and wiped them on her paint spattered Duck Head cutoffs.
“Hey, so did you hear about the dead girls?” Melissa said, slicing and scooping a salt bagel with her fingers for an impatient and bleary-eyed med school resident in hospital scrubs on the other side of the counter.
“Somebody mentioned something,” Betsy said, thinking If that guy’s going to be a doctor one day, he should know better than to ask a stranger to dig her fingernails into his bread, even if it meant a few extra calories. “Some lunatic was ranting about a murder a few minutes ago.” She glanced over at Mack and Gavin’s table, where they were, without question, talking about her. “But I thought it was the usual bullshit. So it’s true? Two girls are dead?”
“Yeah, they found a girl dead at her apartment out by the highway or something. Then another one this morning. They think it’s related. One of them worked as a dispatch at the sheriff’s office. It was all over the police radio,” said Melissa. “I ran into my landlord and he told me. That crazy bastard has a scanner, like a police radio. What a cliché. Anyway, that’s how he heard. The cheap asshole was replacing all of the broken locks in our complex today so it must be serious.”
“Jesus,” said Betsy, thinking of her pre-dawn bike ride, trying to remember if she’d locked the door at Caroline and Ginny’s behind her. She thought about leaving Caroline at the bar.
Eventually Betsy’s curiosity got the better of her and she wandered over to Mack and Gavin’s table with a fresh pot of coffee under the guise of refills.
“So, you’re talking shit about me, obviously,” she said, filling Gavin’s cup first.
“Always, Young, always,” said Mack, balling up his napkin and tossing it on the table.
“What do you know about this so-called murderer?” she asked them, hoping Gavin would answer.
“What I hear is that some girl was sliced from her chin down. Never saw it coming,” said Mack, shoving the last bite of bagel into his mouth. “Alright. Gotta go get unpacked. I got some speakers to attend to. See you back at the house.”
“Ah, so you’re roommates now?” she said, trying not to let her disappointment show. “When’s the first rager?”
“No, not roommates,” said Gavin, quickly. “Just neighbors. Mack moved into the house next door to mine.”
“But there will be a rager. And don’t act like you need an invitation, Betsy. You’ll just follow the scent of beer. Kinda like a drunk, desperate dog, like, like, more like a bloodhound,” Mack said.
“You can bite me, Mack.”
“Been there, Betsy, believe me. Not going back,” he said, pausing a moment to let a dumb, slow grin spread across his face.
“You know, it would suck if you were the next one to get hacked to bits,” he said, turning to look at Gavin. “Later, Gav.”